Tag: Bambara

Africans have been here earlier!

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From yesterdays’ post on indigenous African languages, an interesting discussion emerged, focussing on differences between languages regarding their lexicalisation patterns. While everything can be expressed in every language, not every language has a single word for every notion. Languages tend to have words for notions which are central to their speakers, and which words these are is influenced by their environment and also shaped by the lexicalisation patterns of other languages present in it. West African languages are noteworthy for their many verbs and derivational affixes that specify particular phases of an event, and also for verbs that denote specifically doing something early. In Bambara (Mande, Mali), these are the verbs soli ‘do something early, do something in the morning’ (note how clunky the English translation equivalent is in comparison) and joona ‘ do something earlier than expected’. In Jalonke (Mande, Guinea), there is the verb kurun ‘leave early’, and the Atlantic language Gujaher (Senegal), also has a verb with the same meaning, fura.

Misty morning in Saare Kindia, in the Futa Jalon region of Guinea

Words that sound their meanings

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It’s the weekend, and time to have some fun with language in today’s post honouring African indigenous languages. Words that add expressiveness to utterances exist in all languages, (‘vroum vroum‘, ‘nee-no-nee-no‘, ‘zack‘…), but they are extremely widespread in African languages, to the extent that the term ‘ideophone’ (according to Welmers 1973 “a vivid representation of an idea in a sound”) was coined by the Africanist Clement Doke in 1935 to designate sound-symbolic words that convey in iconic fashion properties of objects and actions. Ideophones can add meaning on sound, colour, size, shape, pattern of movement, texture, intensity and much more. The Mande language Bambara of Mali has its own word class of expressive adverbs that are all ideophonic. Some ideophones in Bambara are very specialized and only occur with one single notion, for instance with colours. Po, pyan, pye, pas, pa, pelepele, poro and puli (pronounced with extra high pitch) all combine with the colour term jɛ ‘white’ and only with it to give rise to the meaning ‘very white’. Other ideophones occur with several notions and receive their contextual meaning from the combination with a verb or noun. To these belong bagibagi, which describes boiling water, high fever and generally high temperatures, kolokoto ‘totally’, used with expressions of failure, or burututu‘ ceaseless’. One of my all-time favourites is fugubɛfugubɛ, which combines with motion verbs to give an impression of quick, agitated motion. If you know Malian sartorial style, you can hear flapping robes trailing in the tailwind of a person taking great strides!

You can read more on ideophones in Bambara in this article:

Dumestre Gérard. Les idéophones : le cas du bambara. In: Faits de langues, n°11-12, Octobre 1998. Les langues d’Afrique subsaharienne. pp. 321-334